If you have even the remotest interest in sport sciences,
I’ve got a new release for you.
David Epstein, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated,
presents some pretty complex topics in the very readable “The Sports Gene”
where he explores the concepts behind whether there is a genetic predisposition
for sport (nature) or is it about development (nuture); the eternal nature vs.
nurture debate aka "are champions made or are they born."
Consider:
Major league baseball players play a charity softball game during the off-season. With the American League down 9-1, the sponsors send out
a ringer – USA Gold Medal pitcher Jennie Fitch. Her defense promptly sat down at their
positions knowing they'd not be needed. She faces Albert Pujols; 4 pitches, 1 ball and 3 swinging strikes. Two
more big leaguers go down swinging. Weeks later with no fans or media, she blew right by
Barry Bonds. Alex Rodriguez refused to face her.
Fitch’s pitching genes? Maybe not. Those MLB-ers have this massive
library of ‘game film’ of pitchers: the arm’s cycle, ball release, spin, etc.
to predict where the ball will cross the plate and when and where to swing the
bat. They had no ‘film’ on Fitch’s underhand delivery of a ball with no visible
seams (so they couldn’t see the spin) delivered at 65mph from 43 feet vs. 60.5
feet. Against Fitch, they were just like us - bums. But were the pros born with the
tools to catalogue pitching? Or did they develop some unique visual skill that we
all have that led to baseball success? Or was it that infamous 10,000 (and
overhyped) hour rule? Baseball, tennis, volleyball, cricket players have
learned to identify the flight of a ball in milliseconds. And that’s not
reaction time, which is largely innate. Elite team sport players not only can identify the flight of a
ball in a heartbeat, they can also reconstruct the players on the field with
only a glance. No one’s born with that. Score one for nuture.
Don’t put too much faith in that 10,000 hour rule.
That number came from interviews with a grand total of 10 violin prodigies.
Australia took good female athletes and within 14 months, turned out world class skeleton
competitors (a winter Olympic sport). Epstein presents many more examples. The
most visible? Usain Bolt wanted to be a cricket player until a track coach
noticed his speed, which most all coaches know you really can’t teach. Score one for nature. And most of those
fast Jamaicans and tireless Kenyans didn’t grow up running for sport. They grew
up running for transportation. Sure, there are plenty of tireless Germans and Costa Ricans. The
genes didn’t leave them and migrate to Jamaica or Africa. The culture did. Minus one for nuture.
Here’s something about speed you probably didn’t know. We
all plateau eventually. And the younger an athlete starts training for speed,
the earlier they plateau. There’s no guarantee that kid who sizzles in 8th
grade will continue to get faster all the way through college. More likely,
that kid may have already peaked. Minus one for early specialization.
But speed kills, right? And speed is all about fast twitch
muscle fibers, right? But it looks like the
fast twitch player can't tolerate training like everyone else. Score
one for individualized training. One size training does not fit all athletes.
Normal wingspan is (roughly) your height.
NBA wingspan is well beyond their height. Actually, having a wingspan greater
than their height is more important in the NBA than height alone. The leg
length in runners is a greater proportion of the runner’s height than the
population. The pelvis is narrower (males and females), and the leg muscle mass
is less in long distance runners than the population. Score one for nature. And
for distance runners, the less muscle mass in the legs contributes to being
more efficient after training. Plus one for nurture.
Geneticists have been crawling all over the world looking
for the genes that explain the Jamaican sprinters, the east African distance
runners, those with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (main reason young athletes die in
sport) – both those who die and those who seem to get by, those rare
individuals whose blood looks like they’ve blood doped and go out to win
Olympic medals with little organized or intensive training, or a gene that
predicts who is more likely to get injured, or accelerate damage after brain
injury, or that really rare person who doesn’t have the ‘stop gene’ that normally
places a ceiling on muscle growth.
Every experienced coach has
presented the same training program for a team. Some kids flourish with
rapid improvement in their fitness and others seem to respond little to
training. Were those latter players ‘non-responders’ to training or was their
fitness so naturally and abnormally high that training was too easy? Nature and
nuture butting heads.
Isn’t it possible that
there is someone in China with the same genetic gifts as the east Africans? Or
in Finland is the next Usain Bolt? Nature. The big problem is exposing people
with these gifts to a variety of sports so they can find what suits them. Nuture.
Which made me think about my own favorite sport. Soccer was mentioned only in the discussion about reading the field of play. No
specific genetic traits are needed so anyone can play it and have fun.
I hear a pick-up game calling my name, so I'm going to take
my generic middle-of-the-road genetic gifts and go have some fun. I’m out of here. Score one for
soccer.
East Coast Don
No comments:
Post a Comment